BETWEEN EMPIRES -BEYOND BORDERS THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA THROUGH THE LENS OF THE KÖPE FAMILY (original) (raw)

2020, 21-st Century Studies in Humanities

The story of the Köpe family begins in the Tanzimat era, a period of Westernizing reforms in the Empire, when the path of András Köpe and Léocadie Tallibart intersected in Constantinople. Born and raised in a village near the city of Brassó, in Hungarian Transylvania, András Köpe fled to the Ottoman capital due to pressure from the Austrian Empire. Léocadie Tallibart, whose family was from Brittany, was in the city accompanying her two brothers; Louis, a watchmaker and jeweller, and Pierre, an architect. The couple married in 1842 and later took over the watch and jewellery shop, which was once situated in the district of Karaköy. In 1882, their second child, Charles, married Rose-Marie Marcopoli, who was coming from a Levantine family of Genoese origin in Trabzon. They had six children with Charles: Charlotte, Ida, Taïb, Ferdinand, Antoine and Eugène. As multicultural members of a multi-ethnic empire with Hungarian and French origins, the lives of the Köpe family and the documents they left behind testify to a moment in time when subjecthood and citizenship were not categorized within stable definitions of nationhood, but also to another era, when nationalism and racism was on the rise.